Facebook's Got Soul?
By Keeley Manca Lambert Posted in Blog on January 26, 2012 0 Comments 1 min read
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Check out this post by E.B. Boyd  at The Morning News about  Facebook’s new ‘Timeline’ feature.

From the post:

 

Facebook’s Timeline (the new version of the user profile which is slated to be released to the general public “in the next few weeks”) wanted to do something more: It wanted to convey a feeling. Two feelings actually: The feeling of telling someone your life story, and the feeling of memory–of remembering your own life.

 

Facebook wanted the Timeline to be a place for self-expression: A way for users to reveal who they are and what their lives are about.

 

Facebook could simply have given the same weight to each individual event–a song you listened to or a run you took–as it gives other pieces of data, like status updates, and listed them all in the Timeline. But that doesn’t work well over time. Individual songs are interesting in the moment you’re listening to them. But over time, you’re more interested in patterns. So Facebook created a set of aggregations and reports, to let you “find those individual patterns that define your identity,” Felton says. By seeing aggregate reports on what songs you listened to at particular times in your life, you get to see “the soundtrack of your life.”

 

Whether we like it or not, within the next couple weeks the ‘Timeline’ is going to be the only interface Facebook offers. What do you think? Will this new design create a more ‘memorable’ social networking experience?


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